5.22.2004

owned

Let it never be said that the Iranians aren't a shrewd lot. Looks like the entire war in Iraq may have been nothing more than their plan to lure the U.S. into action against Saddam Hussein. Achmed Chalabi is now being accused of being an Iranian agent used to plant information on behalf of Iran that would lead us to attak Iraq.

Something always seemed odd with Chalabi. He had been supplying us with information on Iraq's weapons programs for years and even had an office in DC where he lobbied congresscritters on these things all the time, but I don't know of any information that came from his organization that was ever proven to be true. Some was even proven to be flat out false but during the run-up to the war it was his information supplied to the Defense Department that became the driving force in the bid to invade Iraq. It never sat well with me that our policies were being decided based on what a foreigner said rather than from what we learned ourselves but for some reason it never occured to me that there may someone else who was pulling Chalabi's strings.

I was against this war from the day Colin Powell gave his presention to the UN. I have a deep respect for Powell but when I looked over all the photos and other information it looked thin, really thin. I'm not an expert in the field of intelligence but when their best evidence is the fact that construction is going on at a some former weapons plant, you know it's bad. It wasn't even specific construction such as nuclear cooling towers or vats marked "DANGER: ANTHRAX STORAGE, ALLAH AKBAR" on the side, it was just buildings being added here and there. It was then that I decided that it may not be a good idea to inject 150,000 Americans into the heart of Mesopotamia based on the possibility that Saddam was up to something.

Since then I have been embarrassed time and again over our actions. Every time we told them we were there to free them but turned around and shot down people in the streets, I was embarrassed. Every time we told them we were there to give them democracy but were caught corrupting the very syetem we said we were trying to set up, I was embarrassed. That isn't to say we didn't do anything good. By all accounts the world will hopefully be a much better place in the near future with both Saddam Hussein and the 150,000 armed Americans out of Iraq, and mistakes happen during war and innocents get killed but a person still can't help but be embarrassed when we set forth lofty ideals then either fail miserably at them over and over or do the very opposite of what we said we were going to do and call it success.

But this is the most embarrassing thing of all. Folks, we were used.

This has to be one of the most extreme blunders in the history of the United States. We've made plenty of mistakes before, we blundered our way straight into Vietnam and blundered our way back out again, but that was our blunder, those were our goals. This time a foreign nation tricked us into fighting a war for them and not only that but they did it with one man. They weren't even financing him, we were for Christ's sake!

Iran got us good. They fought Iraq for eight bloody years and couldn't beat them but all it took was one man to lure us into doing it for them. And by God we not only fell for it but we poured everything we had into the operation too. Our treasury drained, our honor trampled and our military weary, we have little more to offer our masters in Iran.

Normally a thing like this would propel Iran directly to the top of America's shitlist, but I can't help but look at this with a sense of the surreal. We were such stupid fools for allowing this to happen that it's hard to be angry at them. By all means we should be, but if we ran across someone as stupid as this we'd be hard pressed not to take advantage of them.

I mean, this isn't the kind of stupid you feel sorry for and try to help out. This isn't a poor uneducated kind of stupid. This is the kind of stupid that wins the lottery and travels from bar to bar with a million dollars in the glove compartment of their car and keeps getting robbed over and over again. Tell me you wouldn't rip a sucker like that off if you had half a chance.